September Mood
Reflections at the end of summer, 2024
My previous post was about the metaphysics of time. September before the equinox seems to me to be the ideal period for reflecting on temporality. I am blessed to live in a place with four distinct seasons. As another summer winds down, and the plans I made so confidently in June have once again mostly come to naught, I am inclined to pause and take stock.
The author Robert Pirsig died on September 6th of this year. Pirsig’s best known work is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read it shortly before I entered a master’s program in philosophy at Western Michigan University. I could not have predicted then that my academic career (I use the term loosely) would be uncomfortably similar to that of the protagonist of that novel.
After completing my MA at WMU in 1992, I entered a doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Iowa. Things didn’t work out due to an unfortunate and untimely combination of factors, and I left after two years. In 2000, I resumed my graduate studies and completed a Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Technical Communication at Michigan Technological University in 2005. So, like Pirsig’s character, I started out in philosophy, ran aground, and finished up in rhetoric.
That’s enough autobiography for the moment. What do I now think about the metaphysics of time? As in other areas, I have left behind the formalism of the Analytic movement for the substance of Aristotle.
Change is real, and insofar as time is the measure of change, time is real. Readers who want more can read Book 4, Part 10 ff. of Aristotle’s Physics. The key point is that change is ontologically prior to time, i.e. time depends on change, not vice versa.
No tiresome talk of the tortoise and Achilles today. I feel no obligation whatsoever to prove that change is real, especially not on the eve of the September equinox.
Oh well. I will add write a long post about time and remembrance, using stream-of-consciousness narrative to contrast with the aridity of your previous post, and while you’re at it, show how analytic philosophy is a dead end, but acknowledge that you owe whatever rigor your thought possesses largely to your early exposure to analytic philosophy to the list of projects I failed to complete this summer.
Cue Earth, Wind & Fire.
The burning question in my mind is whether you helped build any of those great ice sculptures at Michigan Tech. I lived in Ontonagon and I remember driving up to Houghton and seeing them.